Since Hamid Dabashi is
pursuing his slanderous campaign against Slavoj Žižek and his colleagues, from
Michael Marder to Santiago Zabala, repeatedly spreading claims which were
demonstrated to be clear lies, all we can do is repeat the facts. Dabashi
begins his last
text with:
“‘Fuck you, Walter Mignolo!’
With those grandiloquent words and the gesture they must have occasioned and
accompanied, the distinguished and renowned European philosopher Slavoj Žižek
begins his response to a piece that Walter Mignolo wrote…”
No reference is given – no
wonder, since I, Slavoj Žižek, have never uttered the phrase “Fuck you, Walter
Mignolo!”. (In a public talk in which I responded to Mignolo’s attack on me, I
did use the words “fuck you,” but they did not refer to Mignolo: his name was
not mentioned in conjunction with them; they were a general exclamation
addressed (if at anyone) at my public.) From here it is just a step to
elevating my exclamation into “Slavoj Zizek’s famous ‘Fuck you, Walter
Mignolo’,” as
Dan Glazerbrook did:
“The world of academia, too,
has seen Europeans ‘lashing out’ at the suggestion that they are not, after
all, the sole and divine arbiters of what constitutes social, political and
philosophical thought: witness, for example, Slavoj Žižek’s famous ‘Fuck you,
Walter Mignolo’ response to a suggestion that there might be more interesting
philosophers than him in the (non-European) world!”
Note how the accusation is
here individualized: not only do I privilege European thought, I even claim
that there are no more interesting philosophers in the non-European world than
ME!
Back to Dabashi’s text, some
pages later, he writes:
“Žižek claims:
‘I am a man and what I have to
recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the
slavery involved in anto Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory
of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to
subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my
basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do
I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored.
I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository
for specific values. Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth than
avenge the blacks of the 17th century?’
This is all fine and dandy –
for Žižek. He can make any claim he wishes. All power to him. But the point is
the singularity of the world, his world: he claims that as a European he is
responsible not just for slavery but also for fighting injustice. He is
absolutely right. But so is the “black man” he just buried alive and relegated
to the seventeenth century. He asserts prophetically that he is ‘a man’. One
hopes he means this not just anatomically. But he is not the only man, either
in body or as archetype. The ‘black man’, as he puts it, is also a man, a
different man, in flogged body and in denied archetype. The black and brown
person – male and female – also has a world, a contemporary world, the world
that Žižek occupies…”
There is just one tiny
problem: the passage quoted and attributed to me and then mocked as an example
of my European racism and of my misreading of Fanon is FROM FANON HIMSELF
(again, no reference is given in Dabashi’s text – it is from Frantz Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press 2008, p. 201-206.) So let us reiterate
the point again: cases like these are not worthy of a detailed answer. If such
slanderous lies convince anyone, then there is no loss in it for us, because we
prefer not to have the support of people like these.
At issue is not only the
dissolution of minimal standards for academic rigor — at least those of
attributing a lengthy quote one cites to its actual author — but also, and more
problematically, a kind of self-righteousness that causes Dabashi to assume
that he is the embodiment of truth itself. By claiming for himself the status
of a victim (if not of the Victim) as far as the colonial and postcolonial enterprises
are concerned and by elevating himself to the level of a representative of all
such victims, he deigns to speak from the standpoint of their suffering — and
there is no arguing with the incarnation of victimhood as such!
Lest we forget, Dabashi is an
endowed professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the United
States and in the world, which hardly qualifies him for the role he allots to
himself. None of us, “European philosophers” attacked by him, comes anywhere
close to such levels of institutional power.
But that is not enough.
Dabashi goes on to speculate (though he presents this as a matter of fact) on
the colonial heritage I, Michael Marder, presumably keep alive by deducing my
lineage from the academic post I hold at a Spanish university. He writes in the
same essay: “Young European philosophers like Zabala and Marder, who think that
as Europeans they own the world of ideas, feign the authority of their colonial
forebears as if anything anyone says anywhere in the world is about them.” This
statement echoes another one made earlier in the text, where the author claims
that in our philosophical arguments my colleagues and I ignore non-European
traditions “just as their forebears did with our parents’ labor, abused and
discarded it.”
What does one say to such
interpellation? That I am of East-European Jewish origin? That my ‘forbears’
did not colonize anything but suffered from pogroms, Nazi gas chambers, and
every other imaginable persecution throughout Europe? That I experienced anti-Semitic
attacks first-hand during my childhood in the Soviet Union? Rational
argumentation indeed fails; it is suffocated by slander. And just as one cannot
argue with a self-appointed representative of the Victim, it is impossible to
argue with an interpellating authority, which in this case dons the mask of
victimhood.
Behaving the way he did,
Dabashi only confirmed the conclusions of my 2013
essay, “A Postcolonial Comedy of Errors”. All the reversals of position,
role-plays, substitutions of characters, and so forth we have witnessed here
are quite comic. The whole thing threatens to turn into a tragicomedy on one
condition only, namely if Dabashi were to be taken seriously and, with his
lies, to inflict irreparable damage on the field of postcolonial studies and,
more importantly, on the intricate question of representation when it comes to
the victims of colonial and postcolonial violence.
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